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Comment by quirino | Hacker News Reader

Evan Chen is a very valuable person in the Math Olympiad scene.

The Geometry book [1] he wrote in high school is required reading for any serious competitor and I believe he is the main responsible for some bringing some techniques into the olympic meta, such as Barycentric Coordinates.

Also, his blog post [2] about writing is one of the best ones I've ever read.

[1] https://web.evanchen.cc/geombook.html [2] https://blog.evanchen.cc/2015/03/14/writing/

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Seems like a really interesting person. Off topic, but his assertions that the majority of students are “conned” into thinking math is important is strange to me. Almost everyone I know always knew they’d never need to know the Pythagorean theorem for the vast majority of life’s obstacles—they weren’t tricked into thinking it was important, they learned it because as a kid you don’t have any power and are coerced to complete certain tests to make your way along a certain circumscribed educational track.

The Pythagorean theorem is really useful for any construction. Builders use it regularly. More experienced DIYers also use it. Not a good example of rarely used schoolbook learning.

How about obscure stuff about hyperbolic trig functions (sinh, tanh and so on)?

I actually just had to use some sin/cos the other day while programming some audio stuff so there ya go. Not so useless after all.

I remember telling a friend once in high school, that I was kind of happy to find a good real-world use for cubic polynomials. She asked what it was, so I started "well I was programming..." and she interrupted, "of course math is useful for programming, that doesn't count".

thank you for this comment this turned my day around

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